By day, the frequent coffins, borne to the grave by but a few bearers, and the frequent smoke that rose outside the place from fires kindled to consume the clothes of the infected, had their sad and startling effect; a migration, too, of a considerable portion of the fisher population to the caves of the hill, in which they continued to reside till the disease left the town, formed a striking accompaniment of the visitation; and yet, curiously enough, as the danger seemed to increase the consternation lessened, and there was much less fear among the people when the disease was actually ravaging the place, than when it was merely stalking within sight around it. We soon became familiar, too, with its direst horrors, and even learned to regard them as comparatively ordinary and commonplace. I had read, about two years before, the pa.s.sage in Southey"s "_Colloquies_," in which Sir Thomas More is made to remark that modern Englishmen have no guarantee whatever, in these latter times, that their sh.o.r.es shall not be visited, as of old, by devastating plagues. "As touching the pestilence," says Sir Thomas (or rather the poet in his name), "you fancy yourselves secure because the plague has not appeared among you for the last hundred and fifty years--a portion of time which, long as it may seem, compared with the brief term of mortal existence, is as nothing in the physical history of the globe. The importation of that scourge is as possible now as it was in former times; and were it once imported, do you suppose it would rage with less violence among the crowded population of your metropolis than it did before the fire? What," he adds, "if the sweating sickness, emphatically called the English disease, were to show itself again? Can any cause be a.s.signed why it is not as likely to break out in the nineteenth century as in the fifteenth?" And, striking as the pa.s.sage is, I remembered perusing it with that incredulous feeling, natural to men in a quiet time, which leads them to draw so broad a line between the experience of history, if of a comparatively remote age, or of a distant place, and their own personal experience. In the loose sense of the sophist, it was contrary to my experience that Britain should become the seat of any such fatal and widely-devastating disease as used to ravage it of old. And yet, now that I saw as terrible and unwonted an infliction as either the plague or the sweating sickness decimating our towns and villages, and the terrible scenes described by De Foe and Patrick Walker fully rivalled, the feeling with which I came to regard it was one, not of strangeness, but of familiarity.
When thus unsuccessfully employed in keeping watch and ward against our insidious enemy, the Reform Bill for Scotland pa.s.sed the House of Lords, and became the law of the land. I had watched with interest the growth of the popular element in the country--had seen it gradually strengthening, from the despotic times of Liverpool and Castlereagh, through the middle period of Canning and G.o.derich, down till even Wellington and Peel, men of iron as they were, had to yield to the pressure from without, and to repeal first the Test and Corporation Acts, and next to carry, against their own convictions, the great Roman Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation measure. The people, during a season of undisturbed peace, favourable to the growth of opinion, were becoming more decidedly a power in the country than they had ever been before; and of course, as one of the people, and in the belief, too, that the influence of the many would be less selfishly exerted than that of the few, I was pleased that it should be so, and looked forward to better days. For myself personally I expected nothing. I had early come to see that toil, physical or intellectual, was to be my portion throughout life, and that through no possible improvement in the government of the country could I be exempted from labouring for my bread. From State patronage I never expected anything, and I have received from it about as much as I ever expected.
I was employed in labouring pretty hard for my bread one fine evening in the summer of 1830--engaged in hewing with bare breast and arms, in the neighbourhood of the harbour of Cromarty, a large tombstone, which, on the following day, was to be carried across the ferry to a churchyard on the opposite side of the Firth. A group of French fishermen, who had gathered round me, were looking curiously at my mode of working, and, as I thought, somewhat curiously at myself, as if speculating on the physical powers of a man with whom there was at least a possibility of their having one day to deal. They formed part of the crew of one of those powerfully-manned French luggers which visit our northern coasts every year, ostensibly with the design of prosecuting the herring fishery, but which, supported mainly by large Government bounties, and in but small part by their fishing speculations, are in reality kept up by the State as a means of rearing sailors for the French navy. Their lugger--an uncouth-looking vessel, representative rather of the navigation of three centuries ago than of that of the present day--lay stranded in the harbour beside us; and, their work over for the day, they seemed as quiet and silent as the calm evening whose stillness they were enjoying; when the letter-carrier of the place came up to where I was working, and handed me, all damp from the press, a copy of the _Inverness Courier_, which I owed to the kindness of its editor. I was at once attracted by the heading, in capitals, of his leading article--"Revolution in France--Flight of Charles X."--and pointed it out to the Frenchmen. None of them understood English; but they could here and there catch the meaning of the more important words, and, exclaiming "_Revolution en France!!--Fuite de Charles X.!!_"--they cl.u.s.tered round it in a state of the extremest excitement, gabbling faster and louder than thrice as many Englishmen could have done in any circ.u.mstances. At length, however, their resolution seemed taken: curiously enough, their lugger bore the name of _"Charles X.;"_ and one of them, laying hold of a large lump of chalk, repaired to the vessel"s stern, and by covering over the white-lead letters with the chalk, effaced the royal name. Charles was virtually declared by the little bit of France that sailed in the lugger, to be no longer king; and the incident struck me, trivial as it may seem, as significantly ill.u.s.trative of the extreme slightness of that hold which the rulers of modern France possess on the affections of their people. I returned to my home as the evening darkened, more moved by this unexpected revolution than by any other political event of my time--brimful of hope for the cause of freedom all over the civilized world, and, in especial--misled by a sort of _a.n.a.logical experience_--sanguine in my expectations for France. It had had, like our own country, its first stormy revolution, in which its monarch had lost his head; and then its Cromwell, and then its Restoration, and its easy, luxurious king, who, like Charles II., had died in possession of the throne, and who had been succeeded by a weak bigot brother, the very counterpart of James VII.
And now, after a comparatively orderly revolution like that of 1688, the bigot had been dethroned, and the head of another branch of the royal family called in to enact the part of William III. The historical parallel seemed complete; and could I doubt that what would next follow would be a long period of progressive improvement, in which the French people would come to enjoy, as entirely as those of Britain, a well-regulated freedom, under which revolutions would be unnecessary, mayhap impossible? Was it not evident, too, that the success of the French in their n.o.ble struggle would immediately act with beneficial effect on the popular cause in our own country and everywhere else, and greatly quicken the progress of reform?
And so I continued to watch with interest the course of the Reform Bill, and was delighted to see it, after a pa.s.sage singularly stormy and precarious, at length safely moored in port. In some of the measures, too, to which it subsequently led, I greatly delighted, especially in the emanc.i.p.ation of our negro slaves in the colonies. Nor could I join many of my personal friends in their denunciation of that appropriation measure, as it was termed--also an effect of the altered const.i.tuency--which suppressed the Irish bishoprics. As I ventured to tell my minister, who took the other side--if a Protestant Church failed, after enjoying for three hundred years the benefits of a large endowment, and every advantage of position which the statute-book could confer, to erect herself into the Church of the many, it was high time to commence dealing with her in her true character--as the Church of the few. At home, however, within the narrow precincts of my native town, there were effects of the measure which, though comparatively trifling, I liked considerably worse than the suppression of the bishoprics. It broke up the townsfolk into two portions--the one consisting of elderly or middle-aged men, who had been in the commission of the peace ere the pa.s.sing of the bill, and who now, as it erected the town into a parliamentary burgh, became our magistrates, in virtue of the support of a majority of the voters; and a younger and weaker, but clever and very active party, few of whom were yet in the commission of the peace, and who, after standing unsuccessfully for the magistracy, became the leaders of a patriotic opposition, which succeeded in rendering the seat of justice a rather uneasy one in Cromarty. The younger men were staunch Liberals, but great Moderates--the elder, sound Evangelicals, but decidedly Conservative in their leanings; and as I held ecclesiastically by the one party, and secularly by the other, I found my position, on the whole, a rather anomalous one. Both parties got involved in law-suits. When the Whig Members of Parliament for the county and burgh came the way, they might be seen going about the streets arm-in-arm with the young Whigs, which was, of course, a signal honour; and during the heat of a contested election, young Whiggism, to show itself grateful, succeeded in running off with a Conservative voter, whom it had caught in his cups, and got itself involved in a law-suit in consequence, which cost it several hundred pounds. The Conservatives, on the other hand, also got entangled in an expensive law-suit. The town had its annual fair, at which from fifty to a hundred children used to buy gingerbread, and which had held for many years at the eastern end of the town links. Through, however, some unexplained piece of strategy on the part of the young Liberals, a market-day came round, on which the gingerbread-women took their stand on a green a little above the harbour; and, of course, where the gingerbread was, there the children were gathered together; and the magistrates, astonished, visited the spot in order to ascertain, if possible, the philosophy of the change.
They found the ground occupied by a talkative pedlar, who stood up strongly for the young Liberals and the new side. The magistrates straightway demanded the production of his license. The pedlar had none.
And so he was apprehended, and summarily tried, on a charge of contravening the statute 55 Geo. III. cap. 71; and, being found guilty of hawking without a license, he was committed to prison. The pedlar, backed, it was understood, by the young Liberals, raised an action for wrongous imprisonment; and, on the ground that the day on which he had sold his goods was a fair or market-day, on which anybody might sell anything, the magistrates were cast in damages. I liked the law-suits very ill, and held that the young Liberals would have been more wisely employed in making money by their shops and professions--secure that the coveted honours would ultimately get into the wake of the good bank-accounts--than that they should be engaged either in scattering their own means in courts of law, or in impinging on the means of their neighbours. And ultimately I found my proper political position as a supporter in all ecclesiastical and munic.i.p.al matters of my Conservative townsmen, and a supporter in almost all the national ones of the Whigs; whom, however, I always liked better, and deemed more virtuous, when they were out of office than when they were in.
On one occasion I even became political enough to stand for a councillorship. My friends, chiefly through the death of elderly voters and the rise of younger men, few of whom were Conservative, felt themselves getting weak in the place; and fearing that they could not otherwise secure a majority at the Council board, they urged me to stand for one of the vacancies, which I accordingly did, and carried my election by a swimming majority. And in duly attending the first meeting of Council, I heard an eloquent speech from a gentleman in the opposition, directed against the individuals who, as he finely expressed it, "were wielding the destinies of his native town;" and saw, as the only serious piece of business before the meeting, the Councillors clubbing pennies a-piece, in order to defray, in the utter lack of town funds, the expense of a ninepenny postage. And then, with, I fear, a very inadequate sense of the responsibilities of my new office, I stayed away from the Council board, and did nothing whatever in its behalf, with astonishing perseverance and success, for three years together. And thus began and terminated my munic.i.p.al career--a career which, I must confess, failed to secure for me the thanks of my const.i.tuency; but then, on the other hand, I am not aware that the worthy people ever seriously complained. There was absolutely nothing to do in the councilship; and, unlike some of my brother office-bearers, the requisite nothing I did, quietly and considerately, and very much at my leisure, without any unnecessary display of stump-oratory, or of anything else.
CHAPTER XXIII.
"Days pa.s.sed; an" now my patient steps That maiden"s walks attend; My vows had reach"d that maiden"s ear, Ay, an" she ca"d me friend.
An" I was bless"d as bless"d can be; The fond, daft dreamer Hope Ne"er dream"d o" happier days than mine, Or joys o" ampler scope."--HENRISON"S SANG.
I used, as I have said, to have occasional visitors when working in the churchyard. My minister has stood beside me for hours together, discussing every sort of subject, from the misdeeds of the Moderate divines--whom he liked all the worse for being brethren of his own cloth--to the views of Isaac Taylor on the corruptions of Christianity or the possibilities of the future state. Strangers, too, occasionally came the way, desirous of being introduced to the natural curiosities of the district, more especially to its geology; and I remember first meeting in the churchyard, in this way, the late Sir Thomas d.i.c.k Lauder; and of having the opportunity afforded me of questioning, mallet in hand, the present distinguished Professor of Humanity in the Edinburgh University,[15] respecting the nature of the cohesive agent in the non-calcareous sandstone which I was engaged in hewing. I had sometimes a different, but not less interesting, cla.s.s of visitors. The town had its small but very choice circle of accomplished intellectual ladies, who, earlier in the century, would have been perhaps described as members of the blue-stocking sisterhood; but the advancing intelligence of the age had rendered the phrase obsolete; and they simply took their place as well-informed, sensible women, whose acquaintance with the best authors was regarded as in no degree disqualifying them from their proper duties as wives or daughters. And my circle of acquaintance included the entire cla.s.s. I used to meet them at delightful tea-parties, and sometimes borrowed a day from my work to conduct them through the picturesque burn of Eathie, or the wild scenes of Cromarty Hill, or to introduce them to the fossiliferous deposits of the Lias or the Old Red Sandstone. And not unfrequently their evening walks used to terminate where I wrought, in the old chapel of St. Regulus, or in the parish burying-ground, beside a sweet wooded dell known as the "Ladies"
Walk;" and my labours for the day closed in what I always very much relished--a conversation on the last good book, or on some new organism, recently disinterred, of the Secondary or Palaeozoic period.
I had been hewing, about this time, in the upper part of my uncle"s garden, and had just closed my work for the evening, when I was visited by one of my lady friends, accompanied by a stranger lady, who had come to see a curious old dial-stone which I had dug out of the earth long before, when a boy, and which had originally belonged to the ancient Castle-garden of Cromarty. I was standing with them beside the dial, which I had placed in my uncle"s garden, and remarking, that as it exhibited in its structure no little mathematical skill, it had probably been cut under the eye of the eccentric but accomplished Sir Thomas Urquhart; when a third lady, greatly younger than the others, and whom I had never seen before, came hurriedly tripping down the garden-walk, and, addressing the other two apparently quite in a flurry--"O, come, come away," she said, "I have been seeking you ever so long." "Is this you, L----?" was the staid reply: "Why, what now?--you have run yourself out of breath." The young lady was, I saw, very pretty; and though in her nineteenth year at the time, her light and somewhat _pet.i.te_ figure, and the waxen clearness of her complexion, which resembled rather that of a fair child than of a grown woman, made her look from three to four years younger. And as if in some degree still a child, her two lady friends seemed to regard her. She stayed with them scarce a minute ere she tripped off again; nor did I observe that she favoured me with a single glance. But what else could be expected by an ungainly, dust-besprinkled mechanic in his shirt sleeves, and with a leathern ap.r.o.n before him? Nor _did_ the mechanic expect aught else; and when informed long after, by one whose testimony was conclusive on the point, that he had been pointed out to the young lady by some such distinguished name as "the Cromarty Poet," and that she had come up to her friends somewhat in a flurry, simply that she might have a nearer look of him, he received the intelligence somewhat with surprise. All the first interviews in all the novels I ever read are of a more romantic and less homely cast than the special interview just related; but I know not a more curious one.
Only a few evenings after, I met the same young lady, in circ.u.mstances of which the writer of a tale might have made a little more. I was sauntering, just as the sun was sinking, along one of my favourite walks on the Hill--a tree-skirted glade--now looking out through the openings on the ever fresh beauties of the Cromarty Firth, with its promontories, and bays, and long lines of winding sh.o.r.e, and anon marking how redly the slant light fell through intersticial gaps on pale lichened trunks and huge boughs, in the deeper recesses of the wood--when I found myself unexpectedly in the presence of the young lady of the previous evening.
She was sauntering through the wood as leisurely as myself--now and then dipping into a rather bulky volume which she carried, that had not in the least the look of a novel, and which, as I subsequently ascertained, was an elaborate essay on Causation. We, of course, pa.s.sed each other on our several ways without sign of recognition. Quickening her pace, however, she was soon out of sight; and I just thought, on one or two occasions afterwards, of the apparition that had been presented as she pa.s.sed, as much in keeping with the adjuncts--the picturesque forest and the gorgeous sunset. It would not be easy, I thought, were the large book but away, to furnish a very lovely scene with a more suitable figure. Shortly after, I began to meet the young lady at the charming tea-parties of the place. Her father, a worthy man, who, from unfortunate speculations in business, had met with severe losses, was at this time several years dead; and his widow had come to reside in Cromarty, on a somewhat limited income, derived from property of her own. Liberally a.s.sisted, however, by relations in England, she had been enabled to send her daughter to Edinburgh, where the young lady received all the advantages which a first-rate education could confer. By some lucky chance, she was there boarded, with a few other ladies, in early womanhood, in the family of Mr. George Thomson, the well-known correspondent of Burns; and pa.s.sed under his roof some of her happiest years. Mr. Thomson--himself an enthusiast in art--strove to inoculate the youthful inmates of his house with the same fervour, and to develop whatever seeds of taste or genius might be found in them; and, characterized till the close of a life extended far beyond the ordinary term, by the fine chivalrous manners of the thorough gentleman of the old school, his influence over his young friends was very great, and his endeavours, in at least some of the instances, very successful. And in none, perhaps, was he more so than in the case of the young lady of my narrative. From Edinburgh she went to reside with the friends in England to whose kindness she had been so largely indebted; and with them she might have permanently remained, to enjoy the advantages of superior position. She was at an age, however, which rarely occupies itself in adjusting the balance of temporal advantage; and her only brother having been admitted, through the interest of her friends, as a pupil into Christ"s Hospital, she preferred returning to her widowed mother, left solitary in consequence, though with the prospect of being obliged to add to her resources by taking a few of the children of the town as day-pupils.
Her claim to take her place in the intellectual circle of the burgh was soon recognised. I found that, misled by the extreme youthfulness of her appearance, and a marked juvenility of manner, I had greatly mistaken the young lady. That she should be accomplished in the ordinary sense of the term--that she should draw, play, and sing well--would be what I should have expected; but I was not prepared to find that, mere girl as she seemed, she should have a decided turn, not for the lighter, but for the severer walks of literature, and should have already acquired the ability of giving expression to her thoughts in a style formed on the best English models, and not in the least like that of a young lady. The original shyness wore away, and we became great friends. I was nearly ten years her senior, and had read a great many more books than she; and, finding me a sort of dictionary of fact, ready of access, and with explanatory notes attached, that became long or short just as she pleased to draw them out by her queries, she had, in the course of her amateur studies, frequent occasion to consult me. There were, she saw, several ladies of her acquaintance, who used occasionally to converse with me in the churchyard; but in order to make a.s.surance doubly sure respecting the perfect propriety of such a proceeding on her part, she took the laudable precaution of stating the case to her mother"s landlord, a thoroughly sensible man, one of the magistrates of the burgh, and an elder of the kirk; and he at once certified that there was no lady of the place who might not converse, without remark, as often and as long as she pleased with me. And so, fully justified, both by the example of her friends--all very judicious women, some of them only a few years older than herself--and by the deliberate judgment of a very sensible man, the magistrate and elder--my young lady friend learned to visit me in the churchyard, just like the other ladies; and, latterly at least, considerably oftener than any of them. We used to converse on all manner of subjects connected with the _belles-lettres_ and the philosophy of mind, with, so far as I can at present remember, only one marked exception. On that mysterious affection which sometimes springs up between persons of the opposite s.e.xes when thrown much together--though occasionally discussed by the metaphysicians, and much sung by the poets--we by no chance ever touched. Love formed the one solitary subject which, from some curious contingency, invariably escaped us.
And yet, latterly at least, I had begun to think about it a good deal.
Nature had not fashioned me one of the sort of people who fall in love at first sight. I had even made up my mind to live a bachelor life, without being very much impressed by the magnitude of the sacrifice; but I daresay it did mean something, that in my solitary walks for the preceding fourteen or fifteen years, a female companion often walked in fancy by my side, with whom I exchanged many a thought, and gave expression to many a feeling, and to whom I pointed out many a beauty in the landscape, and communicated many a curious fact, and whose understanding was as vigorous as her taste was faultless and her feelings exquisite. One of the English essayists--the elder Moore--has drawn a very perfect personage of this airy character (not, however, of the softer, but of the masculine s.e.x), under the name of the "maid"s husband;" and described him as one of the most formidable rivals that the ordinary lover of flesh and blood can possibly encounter. My day-dream lady--a person that may be termed with equal propriety the "bachelor"s wife,"--has not been so distinctly recognised; but she occupies a large place in our literature, as the mistress of all the poets who ever wrote on love without actually experiencing it, from the days of Cowley down to those of Henry Kirke White; and her presence serves always to intimate a heart capable of occupation, but still unoccupied. I find the bachelor"s wife delicately drawn in one the posthumous poems of poor Alexander Bethune, as a "fair being"--the frequent subject of his day-dreams--
"Whose soft voice Should be the sweetest music to his ear, Awakening all the chords of harmony; Whose eye should speak a language to his soul, More eloquent than aught which Greece or Rome Could boast of in its best and happiest days; Whose smile should be his rich reward for toil; Whose pure transparent cheek, when press"d to his, Should calm the fever of his troubled thoughts, And woo his spirit to those fields Elysian-- The paradise which strong affection guards."
It may be always predicated of these bachelors" wives, that they never closely resemble in their lineaments any living woman: poor Bethune"s would not have exhibited a single feature of any of his fair neighbours, the la.s.ses of Upper Rankeillour or Newburgh. Were the case otherwise, the dream maiden would be greatly in danger of being displaced by the real one whom she resembled; and it was a most significant event, which, notwithstanding my inexperience, I learned by and bye to understand, that about this time my old companion, the "bachelor"s wife," utterly forsook me, and that a vision of my young friend took her place. I can honestly aver, that I entertained not a single hope that the feeling should be mutual. On whatever other head my vanity may have flattered me, it certainly never did so on the score of personal appearance. My personal strength was, I knew, considerably above the average of that of my fellows, and at this time my activity also; but I was perfectly conscious that, on the other hand, my good looks rather fell below than rose above the medial line. And so, while I suspected, as I well might, that, as in the famous fairy story, "Beauty" had made a conquest of the "Beast," I had not the most distant expectation that the "Beast" would, in turn, make a conquest of "Beauty." My young friend had, I knew, several admirers--men who were younger and dressed better, and who, as they had all chosen the liberal professions, had fairer prospects than I; and as for the item of good looks, had she set her affections on even the least likely of them, I could have addressed him, with perfect sincerity, in the words of the old ballad:--
"Nae wonder, nae wonder, Gil Morrice, My lady lo"es ye weel: The fairest part o" my body Is blacker than thy heel."
Strange to say, however, much about the time that I made my discovery, my young friend succeeded in making a discovery also;--the maid"s husband shared on her part the same fate as the bachelor"s wife did on mine; and her visits to the churchyard suddenly ceased.
A twelvemonth had pa.s.sed ere we succeeded in finding all this out; but the young lady"s mother had seen the danger somewhat earlier; and deeming, as was quite right and proper, an operative mason no very fitting mate for her daughter, my opportunities of meeting my friend at _conversazione_ or tea-party had become few. I, however, took my usual evening walk through the woods of the Hill; and as my friend"s avocations set her free at the same delightful hour, and as she also was a walker on the Hill, we did sometimes meet, and witness together, from amid the deeper solitudes of its bosky slopes, the sun sinking behind the distant Ben Wevis. These were very happy evenings; the hour we pa.s.sed together always seemed exceedingly short; but, to make amends for its briefness, there were at length few working days in the milder season of which it did not form the terminal one;--from the circ.u.mstance, of course, that the similarity of our tastes for natural scenery led us always into the same lonely walks about the same delicious sun-set hour. For months together, even during this second stage of our friendship, there was one interesting subject on which we never talked. At length, however, we came to a mutual understanding. It was settled that we should remain for three years more in Scotland on the existing terms; and if during that time there should open to me no suitable field of exertion at home, we should then quit the country for America, and share together in a strange land whatever fate might be in store for us. My young friend was considerably more sanguine than I. I had laid faithfully before her those defects of character which rendered me a rather inefficient man-at-arms for contending in my own behalf in the battle of life. Inured to labour, and to the hardships of the bothie and the barrack, I believed that in the backwoods, where I would have to lift my axe on great trees, I might get on with my clearing and my crops like most of my neighbours; but then the backwoods would, I feared, be no place for her; and as for effectually pushing my way in the long-peopled portions of the United States, among one of the most vigorous and energetic races in the world, I could not see that I was in the least fitted for that. She, however, thought otherwise. The tender pa.s.sion is always a strangely exaggerative one. Lodged in the male mind, it gives to the object on which it rests all that is excellent in woman, and in the female mind imparts to its object all that is n.o.ble in man; and my friend had come to regard me as fitted by nature either to head an army or lead a college, and to deem it one of the weaknesses of my character, that I myself could not take an equally favourable view.
There was, however, one profession of which, measuring myself as carefully as I could, I deemed myself capable: I saw men whom I regarded as not my superiors in natural talent, and even possessed of no greater command of the pen, occupying respectable places in the periodical literature of the day, as the editors of Scotch newspapers, provincial, and even metropolitan, and deriving from their labours incomes of from one to three hundred pounds per annum; and were my abilities, such as they were, to be fairly set by sample before the public, and so brought into the literary market, they might, I thought, possibly lead to my engagement as a newspaper editor. And so, as a first step in the process, I resolved on publishing my volume of traditional history--a work on which I had bestowed considerable care, and which, regarded as a specimen of what I could do as a _litterateur_, would, I believed, show not inadequately my ability of treating at least those lighter subjects with which newspaper editors are occasionally called on to deal.
Nearly two of the three twelvemonths pa.s.sed by, however, and I was still an operative mason. With all my solicitude, I could not give myself heartily to seek work of the kind which I saw newspaper editors had at that time to do. It might be quite well enough, I thought, for the lawyer to be a special pleader. With special pleadings equally extreme on the opposite sides of a case, and a qualified judge to hold the balance between, the cause of truth and justice might be even more thoroughly served than if the antagonist agents were to set themselves to be as impartial and equal-handed as the magistrate himself. But I could not extend the same tolerance to the special pleading of the newspaper editor. I saw that, to many of the readers of his paper, the editor did not hold the place of a law-agent, but of a judge: it was his part to submit to them, therefore, not ingenious pleadings, but, to the best of his judgment, honest decisions. And not only did no place present itself for me in the editorial field, but I really could see no place in it that, with the views which I entertained on this head, I would not scruple to occupy. I saw no party cause for which I could honestly plead. My ecclesiastical friends had, with a few exceptions, cast themselves into the Conservative ranks; and there I could not follow them. The Liberals, on the other hand, being in office at the time, had become at least as like their old opponents as their former selves, and I could by no means defend all that _they_ were doing. In Radicalism I had no faith; and Chartism--with my recollection of the kind of treatment which I had received from the workmen of the south still strongly impressed on my mind--I thoroughly detested. And so I began seriously to think of the backwoods of America. But there was another destiny in store for me. My native town, up till this time, though a place of considerable trade, was unfurnished with a branch bank; but on the representation of some of its more extensive traders, and of the proprietors of the neighbouring lands, the Commercial Bank of Scotland had agreed to make it the scene of one of its agencies, and arranged with a sagacious and successful merchant and shipowner of the place to act as its agent. It had fixed, too, on a young man as its accountant, at the suggestion of a neighbouring proprietor; and I heard of the projected bank simply as a piece of news of interest to the town and its neighbourhood, but, of course, without special bearing on any concern of mine. Receiving, however, one winter morning, an invitation to breakfast with the future agent--Mr. Ross--I was not a little surprised, after we had taken a quiet cup of tea together, and beaten over half-a-dozen several subjects, to be offered by him the accountantship of the branch bank. After a pause of a full half-minute, I said that the walk was one in which I had no experience whatever--that even the little knowledge of figures which I had acquired at school had been suffered to fade and get dim in my mind from want of practice--and that I feared I would make but a very indifferent accountant. I shall undertake for you, said Mr. Ross, and do my best to a.s.sist you. All you have to do at present is just to signify your acceptance of the offer made. I referred to the young man who, I understood, had been already nominated accountant. Mr. Ross stated that, being wholly a stranger to him, and as the office was one of great trust, he had, as the responsible party, sought the security of a guarantee, which the gentleman who had recommended the young man declined to give; and so his recommendation had fallen to the ground. "But _I_ can give you no guarantee," I said. "From you," rejoined Mr. Ross, "none shall ever be asked." And such was one of the more special _Providences_ of my life; for why should I give it a humbler name?
In a few days after, I had taken leave of my young friend in good hope, and was tossing in an old and somewhat crazy coasting vessel, on my way to the parent bank at Edinburgh, to receive there the instructions necessary to the branch accountant. I had wrought as an operative mason, including my term of apprenticeship, for fifteen years--no inconsiderable portion of the more active part of a man"s life; but the time was not altogether lost. I enjoyed in these years fully the average amount of happiness, and learned to know more of the Scottish people than is generally known. Let me add--for it seems to be very much the fashion of the time to draw dolorous pictures of the condition of the labouring cla.s.ses--that from the close of the first year in which I wrought as a journeyman up till I took final leave of the mallet and chisel, I never knew what it was to want a shilling; that my two uncles, my grandfather, and the mason with whom I served my apprenticeship--all working men--had had a similar experience; and that it was the experience of my father also. I cannot doubt that deserving mechanics may, in exceptional cases, be exposed to want; but I can as little doubt that the cases _are_ exceptional, and that much of the suffering of the cla.s.s is a consequence either of improvidence on the part of the competently skilled, or of a course of trifling during the term of apprenticeship--quite as common as trifling at school--that always lands those who indulge in it in the hapless position of the inferior workman.
I trust I may further add, that I was an honest mechanic. It was one of the maxims of Uncle James, that as the Jews, restricted by law to their forty stripes, always fell short of the legal number by one, lest they should by any accident exceed it, so a working man, in order to balance any disturbing element of selfishness in his disposition, should bring his charges for work done, slightly but sensibly within what he deemed the proper mark, and so give, as he used to express himself, his "customers the cast of the baulk." I do think I acted up to the maxim; and that, without injuring my brother workmen by lowering their prices, I never yet charged an employer for a piece of work that, fairly measured and valued, would not be rated at a slightly higher sum than that at which it stood in my account.
I had quitted Cromarty for the south late in November, and landed at Leith on a bleak December morning, just in time to escape a tremendous storm of wind and rain from the west, which, had it caught the smack in which I sailed on the Firth, would have driven us all back to Fraserburgh, and, as the vessel was hardly sea-worthy at the time, perhaps a great deal further. The pa.s.sage had been stormy; and a very n.o.ble, but rather unsocial fellow-pa.s.senger--a fine specimen of the golden eagle--had been sea-sick, and evidently very uncomfortable, for the greater part of the way. The eagle must have been accustomed to motion a great deal more rapid than that of the vessel, but it was motion of a different kind; and so he fared as persons do who never feel a qualm when hurried along a railway at the rate of forty miles an hour, but who yet get very squeamish in a tossing boat, that creeps through a rough sea at a speed not exceeding, in the same period of time, from four to five knots. The day preceding the storm was leaden-hued and sombre, and so calm, that though the little wind there was blew the right way, it carried us on, from the first light of morning, when we found ourselves abreast of the Ba.s.s, to only near Inchkeith; for when night fell, we saw the May light twinkling dimly far astern, and that of the Inch rising bright and high right a-head. I spent the greater part of the day on deck, marking, as they came into view, the various objects--hill, and island, and seaport town, of which I had lost sight nearly ten years before; feeling the while, not without some craven shrinkings, that having got to the end, in the journey of life, of one very definite stage, with its peculiar scenery and sets of objects, I was just on the eve of entering upon another stage, in which the scenery and objects would be all unfamiliar and new. I was now two years turned of thirty; and though I could not hold that any very great amount of natural endowment was essentially necessary to the bank accountant, I knew that most men turned of thirty might in vain attempt acquiring the ability even of heading a pin with the necessary adroitness, and that I might fail, on the same principle, to pa.s.s muster as an accountant. I determined, however, obstinately to set myself to acquire, whatever might be the result; and entered Edinburgh in something like spirits on the strength of the resolution. I had transmitted the ma.n.u.script of my legendary work, several months before, to Sir Thomas d.i.c.k Lauder; and as he was now on terms, in its behalf, with Mr. Adam Black, the well-known publisher, I took the liberty of waiting on him, to see how the negotiation was speeding. He received me with great kindness; hospitably urged that I should live with him, so long as I resided in Edinburgh, in his n.o.ble mansion, the Grange House; and, as an inducement, introduced me to his library, full charged with the best editions of the best authors, and enriched with many a rare volume and curious ma.n.u.script.
"Here," he said, "Robertson the historian penned his last work--the _Disquisition_; and here," opening the door of an adjoining room, "he died." I, of course, declined the invitation. The Grange House, with its books, and its pictures, and its hospitable master, so rich in anecdote, and so full of the literary sympathies, would have been no place for a poor pupil-accountant, too sure that he was to be stupid, but not the less determined on being busy. Besides, on calling immediately after at the bank, I found that I would have to quit Edinburgh on the morrow for some country agency, in which I might be initiated into the system of book-keeping proper to a branch bank and where the business transacted would be of a kind similar to what might be expected in Cromarty. Sir Thomas, however, kindly got Mr. Black to meet me at dinner; and, in the course of the evening, that enterprising bookseller agreed to undertake the publication of my work, on terms which the nameless author of a volume somewhat local in its character, and very local in its name, might well regard as liberal.
Linlithgow was the place fixed on by the parent bank as the scene of my initiation into the mysteries of branch banking; and, taking my pa.s.sage in one of the track-boats which at that time plied on the Ca.n.a.l between Edinburgh and Glasgow, I reached the fine old burgh as the brief winter day was coming to a close, and was seated next morning at my desk, not a hundred yards from the spot on which Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh had taken his stand when he shot the good Regent. I was, as I had antic.i.p.ated, very stupid; and must have looked, I suppose, even more obtuse than I actually was: for my temporary superior the agent, having gone to Edinburgh a few days after my arrival, gave expression, in the head bank, to the conviction that it would be in vain attempting making "yon man" an accountant. Altogether deficient in the cleverness that can promptly master isolated details, when in ignorance of their bearing on the general scheme to which they belong, I could literally do nothing until I had got a hold of the system; which, locked up in the ponderous tomes of the agency, for some little time eluded my grasp. At length, however, it gradually unrolled itself before me in all its nice proportions, as one of perhaps the completest forms of "book-keeping"
which the wit of man has yet devised; and I then found that the details which, when I had approached them as if from the outside, had repulsed and beaten me back, could, like the outworks of a fortress, be commanded from the centre with the utmost ease. Just as I had reached this stage, the regular accountant of the branch was called away to an appointment in one of the joint stock banks of England; and the agent, again going into Edinburgh on business, left me for the greater part of a day in direction of the agency. Little more than a fortnight had elapsed since he had given his unfavourable verdict; and he was now asked how, in the absence of the accountant, he could have got away from his charge. He had left _me_ in the office, he said. "What! the _Incompetent_?" "O, that," he replied, "is all a mistake; the Incompetent has already mastered our system." The mechanical ability, however, came but slowly; and I never acquired the facility, in running up columns of summations, of the early-taught accountant; though, making up by diligence what I wanted in speed, I found, after my first few weeks of labour in Linlithgow, that I could give as of old an occasional hour to literature and geology. The proof-sheets of my book began to drop in upon me, demanding revision; and to a quarry in the neighbourhood of the town, rich in the organisms of the Mountain Limestone, and overflown by a bed of basalt so regularly columnar, that one of the legends of the district attributed its formation to the "ancient Pechts," I was able to devote, not without profit, the evenings of several Sat.u.r.days. I formed, at this time, my first acquaintance with the Palaeozoic sh.e.l.ls, as they occur in the rock--an acquaintance which has since been extended in some measure through the Silurian deposits, Upper and Lower; and these sh.e.l.ls, though marked, in the immensely extended ages of the division to which they belong, by specific, and even generic variety, I have found exhibiting throughout a unique family type or pattern, as entirely different from the family type of the Secondary sh.e.l.ls as both are different from the family types of the Tertiary and the existing ones. Each of the three great periods of creation had its own peculiar fashion; and after having acquainted myself with the fashions of the second and third periods, I was now peculiarly interested in the acquaintance which I was enabled to commence with that of the first and earliest also. I found, too, in a bed of trap beside the Edinburgh road, scarce half a mile to the east of the town, numerous pieces of carbonized lignite, which still retained the woody structure--probably the broken remains of some forest of the Carboniferous period, enveloped in some ancient lava bed, that had rolled over its shrubs and trees, annihilating all save the fragments of charcoal, which, locked up in its viscid recesses, had resisted the agency that dissipated the more exposed embers into gas. I had found, in like manner, when residing at Conon-side and Inverness, fragments of charcoal locked up in the gla.s.sy vesicular stone of the old vitrified forts of Craig Phadrig and Knock Farril, and existing as the sole representatives of the vast ma.s.ses of fuel which must have been employed in fusing the ponderous walls of these unique fortalices. And I was now interested to find exactly the same phenomena among the _vitrified_ rocks of the Coal Measures. Brief as the days were, I had always a twilight hour to myself in Linlithgow; and as the evenings were fine for the season, the old Royal Park of the place, with its n.o.ble church, its ma.s.sive palace, and its sweet lake, still mottled by the hereditary swans whose progenitors had sailed over its waters in the days when James IV. worshipped in the spectre aisle, formed a delightful place of retreat, little frequented by the inhabitants of the town, but only all the more my own in consequence; and in which I used to feel the fatigue of the day"s figuring and calculation drop away into the cool breezy air, like cobwebs from an unfolded banner, as I climbed among the ruins, or sauntered along the gra.s.sy sh.o.r.es of the loch. My stay at Linlithgow was somewhat prolonged, by the removal, first of the accountant of the branch, and then of its agent, who was called south to undertake the management of a newly-erected English bank; but I lost nothing by the delay. An admirable man of business, one of the officials of the parent bank in Edinburgh (now its agent in Kirkcaldy, and recently provost of the place), was sent temporarily to conduct the business of the agency; and I saw, under him, how a comparative stranger arrived at his conclusions respecting the standing and solvency of the various customers with whom, in behalf of the parent inst.i.tute, he was called on to deal. And, finally, my brief term of apprenticeship expired--about two months in all--I returned to Cromarty; and, as the opening of the agency there waited only my arrival, straightway commenced my new course as an accountant. My minister, when he first saw me seated at the desk, p.r.o.nounced me "at length fairly caught;" and I must confess I did feel as if my latter days were destined to differ from my earlier ones, well nigh as much as those of Peter of old, who, when he was "young, girded himself, and walked whither he would, but who, when old, was girded by others, and carried whither he would not."
Two long years had to pa.s.s from this time ere my young friend and I could be united--for such were the terms on which we had to secure the consent of her mother; but, with our union in the vista, we could meet more freely than before; and the time pa.s.sed not unpleasantly away. For the first six months of my new employment, I found myself unable to make my old use of the leisure hours which, I found, I could still command.
There was nothing very intellectual, in the higher sense of the term, in recording the bank"s transactions, or in summing up columns of figures, or in doing business over the counter; and yet the fatigue induced was a fatigue, not of sinew and muscle, but of nerve and brain, which, if it did not quite disqualify me for my former intellectual amus.e.m.e.nts, at least greatly disinclined me towards them, and rendered me a considerably more indolent sort of person than either before or since.
It is a.s.serted by artists of discriminating eye, that the human hand bears an expression stamped upon it by the general character, as surely as the human face; and I certainly used to be struck, during this transition period, by the relaxed and idle expression that had on the sudden been a.s.sumed by mine. And the slackened hands represented, I too surely felt, a slackened mind. The unintellectual toils of the labouring man have been occasionally represented as less favourable to mental cultivation than the semi-intellectual employments of that cla.s.s immediately above him, to which our clerks, shopmen, and humbler accountants belong; but it will be found that exactly the reverse is the case, and that, though a certain conventional gentility of manner and appearance on the side of the somewhat higher cla.s.s may serve to conceal the fact, it is on the part of the labouring man that the real advantage lies. The mercantile accountant or law-clerk, bent over his desk, his faculties concentrated on his columns of figures, or on the pages which he has been carefully engrossing, and unable to proceed one step in his work without devoting to it all his attention, is in greatly less favourable circ.u.mstances than the ploughman or operative mechanic, whose mind is free though his body labours, and who thus finds, in the very rudeness of his employments, a compensation for their humble and laborious character. And it will be found that the humbler of the two cla.s.ses is much more largely represented in our literature than the cla.s.s by one degree less humble. Ranged against the poor clerk of Nottingham, Henry Kirke White, and the still more hapless Edinburgh engrossing clerk, Robert Fergusson, with a very few others, we find in our literature a numerous and vigorous phalanx, composed of men such as the Ayrshire Ploughman, the Ettrick Shepherd, the Fifeshire Foresters, the sailors Dampier and Falconer--Bunyan, Bloomfield, Ramsay, Tannahill, Alexander Wilson, John Clare, Allan Cunningham, and Ebenezer Elliot. And I was taught at this time to recognise the simple principle on which the greater advantages lie on the side of the humbler cla.s.s. Gradually, however, as I became more inured to sedentary life, my mind recovered its spring, and my old ability returned of employing my leisure hours, as before, in intellectual exertion. Meanwhile my legendary volume issued from the press, and was, with a few exceptions, very favourably received by the critics. Leigh Hunt gave it a kind and genial notice in his _Journal_; it was characterized by Robert Chambers not less favourably in _his_; and Dr. Hetherington, the future historian of the Church of Scotland and of the Westminster a.s.sembly of Divines--at that time a licentiate of the Church--made it the subject of an elaborate and very friendly critique in the _Presbyterian Review_. Nor was I less gratified by the terms in which it was spoken of by the late Baron Hume, the nephew and residuary legatee of the historian--himself very much a critic of the old school--in a note to a north-country friend. He described it as a work "written in an English style which" he "had begun to regard as one of the lost arts." But it attained to no great popularity. For being popular, its subjects were too local, and its treatment of them perhaps too quiet. My publishers tell me, however, that it not only continues to sell, but moves off considerably better in its later editions that it did on its first appearance.
The branch bank furnished me with an entirely new and curious field of observation, and formed a very admirable school. For the cultivation of a shrewd common sense, a bank office is one of perhaps the best schools in the world. Mere cleverness serves often only to befool its possessor.
He gets entangled among his own ingenuities, and is caught as in a net.
But ingenuities, plausibilities, special pleadings, all that make the stump-orator great, must be brushed aside by the banker. The question with him comes always to be a sternly naked one:--Is, or is not, Mr.
---- a person fit to be trusted with the bank"s money? Is his sense of monetary obligations nice, or obtuse? Is his judgment good, or the contrary? Are his speculations sound, or precarious? What are his resources?--what his liabilities? Is he facile in lending the use of his name? Does he float on wind bills, as boys swim on bladders? or is his paper representative of only real business transactions? Such are the topics which, in the recesses of his own mind, the banker is called on to discuss; and he must discuss them, not merely plausibly or ingeniously, but solidly and truly; seeing that error, however ill.u.s.trated or adorned, or however capable of being brilliantly defended in speech or pamphlet, is sure always with him to take the form of pecuniary loss. My superior in the agency--Mr. Ross, a good and honourable-minded man, of sense and experience--was admirably fitted for calculations of this kind; and I learned, both in his behalf, and from the pleasure which I derived from the exercise, to take no little interest in them also. It was agreeable to mark the moral effects of a well-conducted agency such as his. However humbly honesty and good sense may be rated in the great world generally, they always, when united, bear premium in a judiciously managed bank office. It was interesting enough, too, to see quiet silent men, like "honest Farmer Flamburgh,"
getting wealthy, mainly because, though void of display, they were not wanting in integrity and judgment; and clever unscrupulous fellows, like "Ephraim Jenkinson," who "spoke to good purpose," becoming poor, very much because, with all their smartness, they lacked sense and principle.
It was worthy of being noted, too, that in looking around from my peculiar point of view on the agricultural cla.s.ses, I found the farmers, on really good farms, usually thriving, if not themselves in fault, however high their rents; and that, on the other hand, farmers on sterile farms were _not_ thriving, however moderate the demands of the landlord. It was more melancholy, but not less instructive, to learn, from authorities whose evidence could not be questioned--bills paid by small instalments, or lying under protest--that the small-farm system, so excellent in a past age, was getting rather unsuited for the energetic compet.i.tion of the present one; and that the _small_ farmers--a comparatively comfortable cla.s.s some sixty or eighty years before, who used to give dowries to their daughters, and leave well-stocked farms to their sons--were falling into straitened circ.u.mstances, and becoming, however respectable elsewhere, not very good men in the bank. It was interesting, too, to mark the character and capabilities of the various branches of trade carried on in the place--how the business of its shopkeepers fell always into a very few hands, leaving to the greater number, possessed, apparently, of the same advantages as their thriving compeers, only a mere show of custom--how precarious in its nature the fishing trade always is, especially the herring fishery, not more from the uncertainty of the fishings themselves, than from the fluctuations of the markets--and how in the pork trade of the place a judicious use of the bank"s money enabled the curers to trade virtually on a doubled capital, and to realize, with the deduction of the bank discounts, doubled profits. In a few months my acquaintance with the character and circ.u.mstances of the business men of the district became tolerably extensive, and essentially correct; and on two several occasions, when my superior left me for a time to conduct the entire business of the agency, I was fortunate enough not to discount for him a single bad bill. The implicit confidence reposed in me by so good and sagacious a man was certainly quite enough of itself to set me on my metal. There was, however, at least one item in my calculations in which I almost always found myself incorrect: I found I could predict every bankruptcy in the district; but I usually fell short from ten to eighteen months of the period in which the event actually took place. I could pretty nearly determine the time when the difficulties and entanglements which I saw _ought_ to have produced their proper effects, and landed in failure; but I missed taking into account the desperate efforts which men of energetic temperament make in such circ.u.mstances, and which, to the signal injury of their friends and the loss of their creditors, succeed usually in staving off the catastrophe for a season. In short, the school of the branch bank was a very admirable school; and I profited so much by its teachings, that when questions connected with banking are forced on the notice of the public, and my brother editors have to apply for articles on the subject to literary bankers, I find I can write my banking articles for myself.
The seasons pa.s.sed by; the two years of probation came to a close, like all that had gone before; and after a long, and, in its earlier stages, anxious courtship of in all five years, I received from the hand of Mr.
Ross that of my young friend, in her mother"s house, and was united to her by my minister, Mr. Stewart. And then, setting out, immediately after the ceremony, for the southern side of the Moray Firth, we spent two happy days together in Elgin; and, under the guidance of one of the most respected citizens of the place, my kind friend Mr. Isaac Forsyth, visited the more interesting objects connected with the town or its neighbourhood. He introduced us to the Elgin Cathedral;--to the veritable John Shanks, the eccentric keeper of the building, who could never hear of the Wolf of Badenoch, who had burnt it four hundred years before, without flying into a rage, and becoming what the dead man would have deemed libellous;--to the font, too, under a dripping vault of ribbed stone, in which an insane mother used to sing to sleep the poor infant, who, afterwards becoming Lieutenant-General Anderson, built for poor paupers like his mother, and poor children such as he himself had once been, the princely inst.i.tution which bears his name. And then, after pa.s.sing from the stone font to the inst.i.tution itself, with its happy children, and its very unhappy old men and women, Mr. Forsyth conveyed us to the pastoral, semi-Highland valley of Pluscardine, with its beautiful wood-embosomed priory--one of perhaps the finest and most symmetrical specimens of the unornamented Gothic of the times of Alexander II. to be seen anywhere in Scotland. Finally, after pa.s.sing a delightful evening at his hospitable board, and meeting, among other guests, my friend Mr. Patrick Duff--the author of the "Geology of Moray"--I returned with my young wife to Cromarty, and found her mother, Mr. Ross, Mr. Stewart, and a party of friends, waiting for us in the house which my father had built for himself forty years before, but which it had been his destiny never to inhabit. It formed our home for the three following years. The subjoined verses--prose, I suspect, rather than poetry, for the mood in which they were written was too earnest a one to be imaginative--I introduce, as representative of my feelings at this time: they were written previous to my marriage, on one of the blank pages of a pocket-Bible, with which I presented my future wife:--
TO LYDIA.
Lydia, since ill by sordid gift Were love like mine express"d, Take Heaven"s best boon, this Sacred Book, From him who loves thee best.
Love strong as that I bear to thee Were sure unaptly told By dying flowers, or lifeless gems, Or soul-ensnaring gold.
I know "twas He who formed this heart Who seeks this heart to guide; For why?--He bids me love thee more Than all on earth beside.[16]
Yes, Lydia, bids me cleave to thee, As long this heart has cleaved: Would, dearest, that His other laws Were half so well received!
Full many a change, my only love, On human life attends; And at the cold sepulchral stone Th" uncertain vista ends.
How best to bear each various change, Should weal or woe befall, To love, live, die, this Sacred Book, Lydia, it tells us all.
Oh, much-beloved, our coming day To us is all unknown, But sure we stand a broader mark Than they who stand alone.
_One_ knows it all: not His an eye, Like ours, obscured and dim; And knowing us, He gives this book, That we may know of Him.
His words, my love, are gracious words, And gracious thoughts express: He cares e"en for each little bird That wings the blue abyss.
Of coming wants and woes He thought, Ere want or woe began; And took to Him a human heart.
That He might feel for man.
Then oh! my first, my only love, The kindliest, dearest, best!
On Him may all our hopes repose,-- On Him our wishes rest.
His be the future"s doubtful day, Let Joy or grief befall: In life or death, in weal or woe, Our G.o.d, our guide, our all.
FOOTNOTES: